


Autolatry

by deathwailart



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Messiahs, Prophets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-24
Updated: 2013-11-24
Packaged: 2018-01-02 11:47:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1056388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/deathwailart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A what-if where Desmond takes the other option.</p>
<p>(Written for the prompt autolatry: the worship of one's self)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Autolatry

Two paths before him, the boy who didn't believe until it was almost too late, the boy who wanted to grow up but almost didn't, the boy who ran and became a man who shrugged off an old life (you did not heed our warnings) but used the skills to keep himself alive until he slipped.  
  
The images they were made in that peer down imperiously, the ones who made apes into slaves and gave birth to all the myths and legends. Adam and Eve who stole (reclaimed) forbidden fruit and spurned the garden.  
  
They've earned the right to try, they've earned the right to wipe the slate clean. (Sometimes people have to die, a slippery slope, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and as much as he is Altaïr and Ezio and Ratonhnhaké:ton he is Haytham and he is Clay and he is Adam and he is them.)  
  
He never wanted this but to let her walk free, someone with that much power and will who remembered how things were, the wild angry voice in the dark who guided his hand in a way that still haunts him – he couldn't do that. So call him a coward for not giving his life to the cause but maybe this time someone has to do it. Someone has to turn swords to ploughshares.  
  
(They'll record him as selfish but this is their way. They all write their own histories, all dust in the wind and men who die without ceremony. Maybe that's the part she wanted him to remember. Alone in the dark the last old man on the mountain. On a bench with loved ones in the distance in the city where it all began. One he doesn't know and doesn't _want_ to know. At the hands of a son too alike but too dissimilar all at once. At his own hand tormented and fractured, knowing too much to hold it all in. But he fought and remade himself so that they'd have the freedom to do it and so he can guide them as best he can.)  
  
He was born from the loins of enemies. Now is the time to break bread with the ones that remain – they have the right to choose. He has the right to defend peace in all things.  
  
When he leads them out (his role, he's the leader now, he has to make them believe the way Lucy and Clay and Altaïr did) blinking in the light of a new dawn he knows what he has to do. He has to mentor, like Altaïr to give them words to guide them, he has to recruit and give them purpose, like Ezio, he has to bring together a community and not give up his ideals, like Ratonhnhaké:ton. He can't be his father. He can't lose sight of the little things that slip through your fingers because that's where it starts, they pile up and up and up and you make mistakes and others creep in to whisper promises. He can't even be Desmond anymore. He must become the mentor and he must wear his ideals as his armour. He can't let others craft his myth (he can't be _them_ , the ones who came and dictated, he has an obligation to do this right and to make them learn) so he does it himself. He sees himself in his father's eyes and sees a stranger. Rebecca and Shaun are his right and left hands, the vanguard around him to keep him safe. Not Al Mualim by any means but apart, almost not of this world.  
  
(God became a man completely, a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of being reprehensible—all the way to the abyss. He was Judas. He doesn't tell any of them that his mother raised him on philosophy and poetry, half-forgotten memories and books left at the bar by students or someone trying to impress and it felt wrong to read them, her voice whispering to him and then her shouting when he ran.)  
  
They start with their own because they can't do this alone and his mother holds him and cries; she's lost her son twice, clasping a stranger tight and he can only touch his head to hers and clutch her hand and tell her what needs to be done.  
  
He speaks words they don't understand but they tremble anyway. He talks of war and fire from the skies, he speaks of artifacts best forgotten, of the folly of men as if he were not part of that. He becomes wise.  
  
(He thinks of Lucy. Cruel to love him – and it was something, something tentative and beautiful and snatched away, it's why he preaches as he does to make sure no one else is lost and left alone in the dark and if one day his father is gone then that's the way of things. A mother can be there, the one who brought him into this world bloody and screaming and messy but a father can't see his son rule.  
  
They look for him but there's never a sign.  
  
After all, he was Desmond's mentor for a reason.)  
  
But he is imperfect. God he's so many flaws that he has to hold together and he is haunted by the ghosts who never knew him that he knew all too well, the ghosts whose skin he wore, the ones he stitched piecemeal into this new skin until they all forgot his name and he was simply mentor, loved and fear and revered with baited breath, benevolent until moved to action to protect them, Rebecca and Shaun and in time others doing what he could not, the underbelly to his shine, grit to his polish. The mentor who worked as they did under the hot sun or the driving rain or the biting wind, the mentor who dressed as they did and would appear at your elbow without you noticing. The one who spoke and wove the ancient with the world that was.  
  
And died alone.  
  
They mourned, they knelt by his bed and made him into something he was but was not. Made acts of worship he had not seen himself creating, they who loved him fiercely and fought over that.  
  
Perhaps he did nothing but he believed. That's all they ever asked.  
  
(He was birthed from the messy and flawed and imperfect, chaotic and raw, created and subjugated, free and glorious and wild, taking up arms against their creators, tearing down gods. Gods they remade and made again. Gods they've always fought over, finding miracles in the place of unholy knowledge. He was born of those empty Gods who crept and whispered and manipulated, who clung to what life they could, those of empty hollow promises.  
  
He was never surprised.)


End file.
